This disclosure relates in general to distributing content received by a content publishing system from content provider system, and in particular, to distributing content by a content publishing system based on weights assigned to individual users by the content provider system.
A content publishing system receives content from content provider systems for publishing to users. Content provider systems typically provide targeting criteria for selectively targeting users, for example, targeting criteria based on demographic attributes. This allows content provider systems to target content items to users with specific attributes. For example, the content provider system may specify that a content item should be targeted to users of a specific gender belonging to a particular age group.
Content publishing systems typically ensure privacy of information provided by users. However, if a content publishing system provides information to a content provider system identifying a user to whom a content item was provided, the content provider system can infer attributes describing the user. For example, if the content publishing system provides information to content provider system indicating that a particular user was presented with a content item targeted towards males in the age group 20-25, the content provider system can infer that the user must have male gender and age within range 20-25. In this situation, the content publishing system failed to ensure privacy of the user information by leaking user information to the content provider system. If a content publishing system does not ensure privacy of user information, users would prefer not to provide their information to the content publishing system. As a result, the content publishing system would lose subscribers and in turn revenue based on the subscribers.